AES London 2010
Special Event

Saturday, May 22, 12:45 — 13:45 (Room C3)

Opening Ceremonies

Abstract:
This year’s Keynote Speaker is Masataka Goto. Masataka Goto is the leader of the Media Interaction Group at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. In 1992 he was one of the first to start work on automatic music understanding, and has since been at the forefront of research in music technologies and music interfaces based on those technologies. Since 1998 he has also worked on speech recognition interfaces. He has published more than 160 papers in refereed journals and international conferences. Over the past 18 years, he has received 25 awards, including the Young Scientists’ Prize, the Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the Excellence Award in Fundamental Science of the DoCoMo Mobile Science Awards, and the Best Paper Award of the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ). He has served as a committee member of over 60 scientific societies and conferences and was the General Chair of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2009) and the Chair of the IPSJ Special Interest Group on Music and Computer (SIGMUS). The title of his speech is “Music Listening in the Future.”

Music understanding technologies based on signal processing have the potential to enable new ways of listening to music—for everyone. We have developed several Active Music Listening interfaces to demonstrate how end users can benefit from these new technologies. Active Music Listening aims at allowing the user to understand better the music he or she listens to and to actively influence the listening experience. For example, our Active Music Listening interface “SmartMusicKIOSK” has a chorus-search function that enables the user to access directly his or her favorite part of a song (and to skip others) while viewing a visual representation of its musical structure. The software “LyricSynchroniser” can automatically synchronize song lyrics to a recording and highlights the phrase currently sung. A user can easily follow the current playback position and click on a word in the lyrics to listen to it. Given polyphonic sound mixtures taken from available music recordings, our interfaces thus enrich end-users’ music listening experiences, and open up new ways of music listening in the future.